Since the nineties, education has played a fundamental role in the global struggle against poverty. International organisms, national governments and non-governmental organisations agree in highlighting the virtues of investing in education as a mechanism to reduce poverty and stimulate development. Moreover, nowadays there is a global consensus that not only defines what education has to achieve, but also establishes how it should be achieved. In other words, it defines the best policies for increasing the efficacy of investment in education as a means of reducing poverty. Under the recommendations of the global agenda, state intervention, both in education and in other social sectors, must adopt an explicitly pro-poor orientation, directly oriented to the most in need. The objective is to apply targeting policies that, through selective action, guarantee the orientation of resources, services and state intervention towards the population in demonstrated situations of poverty and need.
In this context, the two main objectives of the doctoral thesis are the following:
First, it aims to analyse the position occupied by the relationship between education and poverty in the global agenda for development and its repercussions on the design of national education policies. In order to do this, the research studies why and how investment in education has been prioritised in the fight against poverty, what role have international organisations played in the definition of such agenda and what mechanisms have been used to promote its political recommendations on a global scale. At the same time, it studies the concretion of this agenda in the education policies that are applied in the southern countries, specifically in Latin America.
Second, it intends to analyse the main limitations and omissions in the relationship between education and poverty established by the global agenda and by targeting policies. The specific objective of the analytical work is to study what we understand as one of the main omissions of both the global agenda and the targeting policies, that is: the lack of consideration of the effects of poverty on education. In order to do this the thesis adopts a qualitative approach that allows identifying the various manifestations and expressions of poverty, the different ways of experiencing poverty and the key dimensions that in each case shape the educational career of young people and their chances of success at school. The fieldwork has included 89 interviews to poor and extremely poor children and teenagers, their mothers and their teachers.
Some of the main contributions of the thesis are the following:
It allows developing a pluri-scalar analysis of education policy. This is, the thesis is based in a three-way focus that simultaneously explores three scales (global, national and local) in the analysis of the relationship between education and poverty.
It permits to analyse empirically the limits of both the global educational agenda and the targeting policies. This means, the analysis has not been limited to exploring the limitations of the agenda from a theoretical point of view. Neither has it been limited to analysing the limitations of targeting policies from a technical point of view. On the contrary, the research has allowed studying its limitations and omissions on the basis of the local realities in which the agenda and the targeting policies aim to act.
It contributes to systematize the effects of poverty on education. The analysis developed in the doctoral thesis, not only identifies the several effects of poverty in different contexts (family, school, leisure and students practices and dispositions), but also shows the relationship between the different contexts, presenting a multidimensional analysis of the effects of poverty on education.